Metadata
WORK ID: NEFA 17585 (Master Record)
| Title | Year | Date |
| TOM PICKARD. NORTHUMBRIAN POET | 1969 | 1969-01-01 |
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Details
Original Format: 16mm Colour: Black & White Sound: Sound Duration: 15 mins 49 secs Credits: Individuals: George Auckland, Johnny Handle, Alan Jackson, Pater Lewis, Margaret Lewis, Tom Pickard, Jon Silkin Organisations: Durham University Film Group Genre: Documentary Subject: Urban Life |
| Summary Documentary by the Durham University Film Group on working class Northumbrian poet Tom Pickard and the international centre for poets in Morden Tower, Newcastle, founded by the poets Connie and Tom Pickard in March 1964. A narrator describes Pickard’s move to Northumberland, survival as a poet, his influences and events at the Morden Tower poetry c ... |
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Description
Documentary by the Durham University Film Group on working class Northumbrian poet Tom Pickard and the international centre for poets in Morden Tower, Newcastle, founded by the poets Connie and Tom Pickard in March 1964. A narrator describes Pickard’s move to Northumberland, survival as a poet, his influences and events at the Morden Tower poetry centre. The venue has hosted readings by celebrated poets that include Basil Bunting in 1965 and the American beat poets, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence...
Documentary by the Durham University Film Group on working class Northumbrian poet Tom Pickard and the international centre for poets in Morden Tower, Newcastle, founded by the poets Connie and Tom Pickard in March 1964. A narrator describes Pickard’s move to Northumberland, survival as a poet, his influences and events at the Morden Tower poetry centre. The venue has hosted readings by celebrated poets that include Basil Bunting in 1965 and the American beat poets, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso. Footage includes a performance by Alan Jackson and the Living Mythology blues jazz group
Title: Tom Pickard. Northumbrian Poet
Credit: Photographed by George Auckland
Credit: Jon Silkin
Credit: Poems read by Tom Pickard. Alan Jackson
Credit: Music in the Tower by Living Mythology
Credit: Ballad sung by Johnny Handle
Credit: Written and Directed by Peter & Margaret Lewis
Credit: A Durham University Film Group Production
Titles appear over various shots of the Northumbrian countryside near Allendale.
The film opens with a shot of Shield Street in the rural town of Allendale, moving past the Hotspur Hotel. A man in Wellington boots (Tom Pickard) posts a letter at the Allendale Post Office and walks away. A dog peers out of a window flap at the back of a Land Rover. Tom Pickard gets into the “R.S. Patterson & Co 24hR Breakdown Service” Land Rover and drives away, passing the ivy-covered Dale Hotel. General views record the Land Rover as it travels along country roads, intercut with a portrait shot from inside the vehicle. The poet drives, and then walks through the muddy fields of Nether Scotch Hall land to his home in a small farmhouse. His young son runs to meet him.
Inside, Tom and Connie Pickard and their son sit in the living room beside the fire, drinking tea, and looking at the Fulcrum Press book of Basil Bunting’s poems “Briggflatts.” There are close-ups of the book propped on a sofa, a photograph of Bunting and Allen Ginsberg, and a drawing of a poet pinned to the wall. Another shot of a cosy domestic scene by the fire follows. The scene closes with a close-up of the title page of Tom Pickard’s book of poems “High on the Walls,” published in 1968.
Tilt down from the entrance to Morden Tower to Back Stowell Street along the West Walls in Newcastle, where Tom Pickard walks along the lane towards camera. Various shots follow his progress to Morden Tower. There are interior shots of the messy shelves of books, wall art advertising “Warp” Morden Tower birthday celebration, and notices advertising poetry events. He lights the old-fashioned ceiling gaslights in the room and begins to tidy up. Back outside, he locks up and leaves.
A handwritten poster advertises readings by Alan Jackson and Elaine Feinstein at the Morden Tower. Tom Pickard enters the Northumberland Arms public house in Newcastle with the two poets. There are various shots inside the pub. The male customers look to camera with amusement as a woman in a headscarf pulls a pint behind the bar. A clock reads eight forty. The poets enjoy a drink and a joke in the snug room bar. Pickard chats with a couple of men in another room at the pub.
Exterior shot of the Morden Tower at night. Various shots then record individuals and audience groups inside Morden Tower, along for the poetry readings, as they mingle and chat, one holding a copy of Samuel Beckett’s "Poems In English". The camera pans along seated members of the audience, many smoking, many young, some in the beatnik or hippy fashion of the period.
Poet Alan Jackson reads his poetry. Portrait shots of the poet are intercut with portrait shots of individual members of the audience, listening, smoking. There are shots of individual members of the band Living Mythology as they perform at the centre, playing a tabla, guitar, harmonica and singing. Many in the audience are seated on the floor. The exterior of the Morden Tower is then captured in darkness.
In the next scene, there is a general view of Tom Pickard’s house in the Allendale valley. He strides past camera in his parka coat with his dog and heads across a muddy field. A shot of the entrance to the Morden Tower is followed by a poster for his appearance at The Studio, Fine Arts Society, 51a Saddler Street. There is a final shot of the exterior of the Morden Tower. The film closes with a portrait photograph of Tom Pickard holding onto a strand of barbed wire.
End Title: The End
[Note: NEFA also holds the film We Make Ships (1986) scripted by Tom Pickard and produced by Siren Films].
Context
The Morden Tower poetry readings were initiated by North Shields-born Connie Pickard, along with fellow poet and husband Tom Pickard. She continued to organise events at this unique venue for 50 years and received the Ted Slade Award for her outstanding contribution to poetry in 2008.
“I learned more reading at Morden Tower than I had at a hundred universities.” So said American beat poet Allen Ginsberg about an extraordinary venue for experimental poetry and music perched on the medieval...
The Morden Tower poetry readings were initiated by North Shields-born Connie Pickard, along with fellow poet and husband Tom Pickard. She continued to organise events at this unique venue for 50 years and received the Ted Slade Award for her outstanding contribution to poetry in 2008.
“I learned more reading at Morden Tower than I had at a hundred universities.” So said American beat poet Allen Ginsberg about an extraordinary venue for experimental poetry and music perched on the medieval West Walls of Newcastle upon Tyne. The first Morden Tower performance by poet and song writer Pete Brown took place on “Blooms Day”, 16th June 1964. The poet was first introduced to Tom by Ian Wood, a filmmaker working for the National Coal Board documentary unit. Brown later went on to write most of the lyrics for Cream with Jack Bruce. By word of mouth, its fame grew. On December 22nd 1965, an attentive young audience crowded into the tiny battered space to hear the first reading of epic modernist poem Briggflatts by Northumbrian poet Basil Bunting, a misfit in the literary world at the time, whose advice to young poets was “Compose aloud; poetry is sound.” Connie and Tom Pickard met Bunting in 1964, and he encouraged them in their venture, transforming the old tower into an intimate bookshop and performance space, halfway along an unlit narrow alley, Back Stowell Street, on the western portion of the thirteenth century wall that once protected the city of Newcastle upon Tyne from invading Scots. Tom recollects:"Attending a Tower gig on a winter night took a little courage, stepping into the darkness in the hope that you would not (or might) be molested on the way. Fortunately, courage was available by the pint in the Northumberland Arms at the end of the lane and we took our fill before the event, during the interval, and afterwards. The only other arts venue in the city that generated a frisson of fear as you approached was The Downbeat, situated in a near derelict warehouse where Eric Burdon, Alan Price, and other Geordie blues artists got started, and where violence was a jumpy neighbor." Tom and Connie were supported in the early days by some of the remarkably talented creative people at Kings College, University of Newcastle, such as Connie’s friend, “the father of Pop Art,” Richard Hamilton, who was teaching fine art, and with whom Tom edited the arts magazine King Ida's Watch Chain and co-founded the magazine Eruption and the bookstore Ultima Thule. This film by Peter and Margaret Lewis, documenting the hard early years of both the unemployed poet Tom Pickard and his family, and of Morden Tower, is almost certainly propaganda in part, sticking it to the arts bureaucracy of the time, which Pickard thought mired in an imperialist mindset, a hierarchy run by "toffs". Listen to the opening sound track by Wallsend folksinger, songwriter, musician and composer Johnny Handle, a one-time miner and later founder of The High Level Ranters, and you'll catch the drift. (Incidentally, Eric Burdon first heard House of the Rising Sun, a traditional folk blues song, and The Animals' No.1 hit of 1964, sung by Handle in a Newcastle club.) The Tower has played host to many of the world’s finest poets. Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, and Stevie Smith, the American Black Mountain and Beat poets including Ed Dorn, Robert Creeley, Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti: all performed within its walls. In the early days, many of the poets were unheard elsewhere in England. Tom recalls: "What the tower did was to create an audience which was the sixties in microcosm, a space where artists experimented across disciplines and where an audience came together across a rigid class structure. I take it as read that artist and audience are sometimes interchangeable." Dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson and poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy are more recent readers at this literary landmark, which has also provided a platform for new music by Paul Smith of Maximo Park and Viv Albertine, who played for the influential punk band The Slits. Tom Pickard was born in Newcastle and left school at 14. By the time this film was made, Fulcrum Press had published his first book of poems called High on the Walls (1967) Critics have commented on how the speech and strong tradition of popular song and industrial ballads of the North East have informed his work, and his poetry is peppered with local words and slang. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2016/01/to-show-me-how-it-was-done-on-the-fiftieth-anniversary-of-briggflatts- |
